TRUWinnipeg.org

In response to Professor Chis Leo’s blog article, Kissing Frogs: Building Coalitions For Change In Canadian Cities, about building coalitions to make Winnipeg a nicer place to live insofar as transit and housing are concerned:

In the late 90s, a guy who is and was a cycling activist happened across my uwto.org website.

Cycling Guy suggested starting a transit advocacy group, lamenting the lack of a posted schedule at his stop in suburban Fort Garry. He also thought his 95 Morley bus shouldn’t have been cut by former Mayor Susan Thompson.

Originally the group was called TRAM (Transit Riders Association of Manitoba). We used to meet in the old Eco-net offices, and even joined the lefty environmental group Eco-Net. A true coalition.

A few months later someone who didn’t like the name moved and passed a motion to change it to Citizens for Better Public Transit in Winnipeg–CBPTW. What a mouthful! Perhaps some just don’t like streetcars (trams), as the group’s former name suggested.

Cycling Guy was always wishy-washy about rapid transit for Winnipeg, saying that we don’t need it (population isn’t large enough for it). Yet he would always return back from a trip from Greater Vancouver exulting how great was their transit system.

Another pair of gentlemen had taken an urban planning course at the University of Manitoba in the 1980s. One was in favour of light-rail transit (LRT), while the other would play the contrarian. The naysayer, most of all, was vociferously opposed to an underground heavy-rail (subway) for our city, which the other member supported.

When in 1999 I got full-time employment I started to see the group lose its momentum. We had a small website hosted on Yahoo’s Geocities with some content–but nothing compared to the TRUWinnipeg website.

During that time I had gotten together with others on the left and attended the various environmental, TransPlan, Plan Winnipeg, etc. groups, which we were always outnumbered by the trucking and road-building folks. I know that they like to use what’s called the consensus-building model, which gets everyone to agree with the same thing, but in the end you’re always going to have a few that don’t support the end result.

Using that model, for example, TransPlan committee had moved some people to support expanded roadways, despite their 1995 telephone survey which suggested that Winnipegger’s were 71% in favour of spending on rail rapid transit and not more roads.

In the early part of the 2000s some people in Winnipeg had formed a coalition to fight True North’s demolition of the historic Eaton’s building and to stop the “boutique” hotel from being built at The Forks. Neither coalition succeeded.

People were exhausted by fighting both projects. But by spring, 2004, while Murray’s BRT proposal was being promoted in the local papers, our group, Citizens for Better Public Transit (CBPTW) had attracted some people who wanted us to meet again.

So we did, the result being that the group folded because a new member had taken control of the meeting’s agenda by angering one of the founding members. There was name-calling and it got ugly. One of the new people left before we adjourned.

Earlier in ‘04 I had transcribed the Norman Wilson subway report from ‘59 onto the Net. Doing this basically re-awakened the idea of a subway for Winnipeg, as younger generations had not even been aware that a plan of this magnitude existed in Winnipeg’s modern history.

By the autumn of 2004–with all the newspaper articles, letters to the editor and dialogue on CJOB and CBC about rapid transit in Winnipeg–I had concluded that those who advocate for better cycling in cities tend to be against rail rapid transit. They are just “backwards people,” as I call them.

At this point, I don’t think I can work with these so-called “environmentalists” on rapid transit, because they are really for sprawl-inducing, diesel-polluting, worse-than-useless “Bus Rapid Transit” (BRT), not LRT or subway.

What is interesting is that two prominent people on the left, Jeff Lowe, and Nick Ternette are in favour of rail rapid transit. So there is some kind of ideological difference between them and the bicycling granola-crunchers out there.

That’s the difference between CBPTW and TRUWinnipeg. Where CBPTW failed was in being indecisive about rapid transit — not saying from the outset that rail should be the mode. That happened because the people that called themselves “CBPTWers” (I guess) all came from different ideological points of view. Some didn’t want any form of rapid transit (”my bicycle is my rapid transit”), others favoured LRT, and one person was in favour of a subway. Constant clashes were inevitable.

TRUWinnipeg is different in that we are unanimous in pronouncing our support of underground heavy rail, specifically the Norman D. Wilson subway plan, for Winnipeg. End of story, with very little negotiating room.

Like the saying goes: “You either stand for something, or you stand for nothing.”

– Jim Jaworski